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Teacher Quality (teacher + quality)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting60%

Selected Abstracts

How and Why Has Teacher Quality Changed in Australia?

THE AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 2 2008
Andrew Leigh
International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we compare those who have entered the teaching profession in Australia over the past two decades. We find that the aptitude of new teachers has fallen considerably. Between 1983 and 2003, the average percentile rank of those entering teacher education fell from 74 to 61, while the average rank of new teachers fell from 70 to 62. We find that two factors account for much of the decline: a fall in average teacher pay (relative to other occupations) and a rise in pay differentials in non-teaching occupations. [source]

Teacher Identity and Agency in School Worlds: Beyond the All-Good/All-Bad Discourse on Accountability-Explicit Curriculum Policies

CURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 2 2006
KRIS SLOAN
ABSTRACT Drawing on case studies of three elementary school teachers in a diverse urban school setting in Texas, the author explores the varied ways teachers actively read accountability-related curriculum policies and then respond to these policies. Rooted in classroom observations and extensive teacher interviews, the author examines issues of teacher identity and identity formation as a base from which to explore teacher agency vis-à-vis accountability-explicit curriculum policies. His analysis suggests that (1) individual teachers actively read and respond to locally conceived accountability-explicit curriculum policies in varied, perhaps even unique, ways; (2) teacher identities are powerful means through which to understand these varied experiences with and responses to accountability-explicit curriculum policies; and (3) current understandings of teacher agency vis-à-vis accountability-explicit curriculum policies as merely a capacity to resist,as does much of the literature that is critical of accountability,obfuscates important issues of teacher quality and equity. [source]

Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement

ECONOMETRICA, Issue 2 2005
Steven G. Rivkin
This paper disentangles the impact of schools and teachers in influencing achievement with special attention given to the potential problems of omitted or mismeasured variables and of student and school selection. Unique matched panel data from the UTD Texas Schools Project permit the identification of teacher quality based on student performance along with the impact of specific, measured components of teachers and schools. Semiparametric lower bound estimates of the variance in teacher quality based entirely on within-school heterogeneity indicate that teachers have powerful effects on reading and mathematics achievement, though little of the variation in teacher quality is explained by observable characteristics such as education or experience. The results suggest that the effects of a costly ten student reduction in class size are smaller than the benefit of moving one standard deviation up the teacher quality distribution, highlighting the importance of teacher effectiveness in the determination of school quality. [source]

Classroom processes and positive youth development: Conceptualizing, measuring, and improving the capacity of interactions between teachers and students

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT, Issue 121 2009
Robert C. Pianta
The National Research Council's (NRC) statement and description of features of settings that have value for positive youth development have been of great importance in shifting discourse toward creating programs that capitalize on youth motivations toward competence and connections with others. This assets-based approach to promote development is consistent with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) framework for measuring and improving the quality of teacher-student interactions in classroom settings. This chapter highlights the similarities between the CLASS and NRC systems and describes the CLASS as a tool for standardized measurement and improvement of classrooms and their effects on children. It argues that the next important steps to be taken in extending the CLASS and NRC frameworks involve reengineering assessments of teacher and classroom quality and professional development around observations of teachers' performance. This might include using observations in policies regarding teacher quality or a "highly effective teacher" that may emanate from the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind and moving away from a course or workshop mode of professional development to one that ties supports directly to teachers' practices in classroom settings. [source]

DOES TEACHER QUALITY AFFECT STUDENT PERFORMANCE?

BULLETIN OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, Issue 4 2009
EVIDENCE FROM AN ITALIAN UNIVERSITY
H52; I2 ABSTRACT In this paper, we analyse whether the characteristics of university teaching staff matter with regard to students' performance and interest in the discipline. We use data on about 1000 students enrolled on the first-level degree course in business and economics at a medium-sized Italian university. Thanks to the random assignment of students to different teaching classes during their first year, we are able to analyse the effect that teachers with different characteristics, in terms of experience and research productivity, produce both on students' performance, measured in terms of the grades obtained at subsequent examinations, and on courses chosen. Our results suggest that teacher quality has statistically significant effects on students' grades in subsequent courses. These effects are also robust after controlling for unobserved individual characteristics. On the other hand, we find less clear evidence when relating teacher quality to student involvement with a subject. It emerges that research productivity does not produce a statistically significant effect on the probability of a student undertaking additional courses in a subject, while more experienced teachers have a negative impact. However, also this effect does not become statistically significant when we run separate regressions for different disciplines. [source]